Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair and colleagues around the table, we've had a number of witnesses come before us, all bringing their opinion to bear on this. Why I'm offering this amendment...as you can see, it takes from the prior amendment, which was ruled out of order, those areas that the previous government had considered when they were trying to limit this area of conditional sentencing. What you see before us is: “...serious personal injury offences as defined in section 752, a terrorism offence or a criminal organizational offence prosecuted by way of indictment, for which the maximum term of”...and then we go on with the ten years.
So the amendment, as you see, interjects categories of offences that we are seeking to have removed at this time from the areas where it would be available for a conditional sentence.
We believe that in these areas you have the whole section of criminal organization of the Criminal Code, where it could encapsulate very many provisions of the Criminal Code if there are more under the definition of that part--so many of the areas, if they were involved in criminal organizations--for instance, drug trafficking--would be captured under this part. That would leave free those areas where you have an individual operating alone, who, as we heard with the evidence of the Gladu court and some of the other testimony here, the drug treatment courts could successfully put into a treatment program if this section was widened, as the bill originally imagined.
I look at the terrorism offence sections, and again, a lot of the areas, if they were caught, would be...the list would be expanded if terrorism was involved. I think Canadian society is very concerned with terrorism activity, and we believe that anybody involved in that type of activity, who is proved successfully by the Crown to be so engaged, should have the conditional sentence removed.
I would remark that the “serious personal injury” offence, again, is flexible enough in the situation to add those areas that would cause the greatest concern to the public. My information is that we consulted on this, these were the areas that were most concerned, and that we were not really intending to be originally...before the Proulx decision. These are the things where we think the appropriate constraints should come in.
This has the effect of removing some of the property offences that were widely in this legislation. I remind the committee members that when the minister came before us he told us to talk amongst ourselves and to our colleagues, which has been done. I gave the parliamentary secretary notice of where we were heading. I've certainly said it here in the committee many times.
We received some statistics today, a little late I might add, but that's what happens when you're working under these types of deadlines. The statistics today said that a lot of the area, I think it was 29%, was in the serious violent.... I can't place those statistics at this moment, Mr. Chair.
I don't intend to talk a long time, because my government chose these areas with care in the last Parliament. I could not add the area of denunciation that we had also added, because it was introducing another concept to the bill that wasn't structured in the one-paragraph bill, nor was I capable of doing a listing. So this is the option I was forced to follow, because this bill did not come to us before second reading. It complies, and I think at this point in time this is a partial restraint on conditional sentencing. Our government's belief is that conditional sentencing....
The testimony we heard from many witnesses is that we should not even be going this far. The most compelling answer was when I posed the direct question to Julian Roberts, who had done a lot of the work for the justice department, who stated that this is the area we should be going in.
I will leave my case there. Some of my colleagues may wish to comment. I don't submit that this is all I could say in this area. I think it's one paragraph, I have limited ways to amend, and this is the way that most fit with what we had considered doing in the previous government.